Residents bring renewal to South Bend’s near northwest neighborhood
When I moved to South Bend 50 years ago, I settled in the city’s near northwest neighborhood, drawn to the Victorian houses on brick streets, the spicy mix of intellectuals and bohemians, and the beautiful St. Joseph River. Then, over the next few decades, I watched my neighborhood—along with the rest of the city—succumb to the ubiquitous Rust Belt blight that was propelled by the loss of good jobs at Studebaker, nationwide racial tensions and white flight to the suburbs. Our grocery store, the hardware store, the laundromat, the pharmacy, the flower shop—one after the other all shut down.
But recently as I was walking down Portage Avenue, I saw something that brought tears to my eyes and joy to my heart: foot traffic. A walkable neighborhood. A dream coming true.
How did this happen? How did we get from there to here? How does vitality return to a community?Although it holds glints of the miraculous, the transformation has been a combination of good leadership, mutual aid and grassroots activism.
The Near Northwest Neighborhood Inc., which is “dedicated to the preservation and revitalization of the neighborhood,” provides the crux of that good leadership. Formed by concerned neighbors in 1974, by 1999 it had become a nonprofit community development corporation focusing on the business of affordable housing. In 2015, the NNN had the good luck to hire Kathy Schuth as director. Schuth, an architect who describes herself as “Catholic Workers Movement–adjacent” (her wife Sheila is a member) brings a valuable combination of skills to the job: She has an innate ability not only to see what is needed, but to foster the cooperation needed to get there.
“I want my team to buy into a shared vision and make their choice within that,” says Schuth. The shared vision is in part about creating the kind of community that makes it easy to be good.
There’s a lot of saying yes involved, not just to the staff but to residents as well. Schuth’s comment, “We hand them a key,” can be taken figuratively and literally. Over the years, the NNN Community Center has held frequent events organized and run by residents: yoga and Zumba classes, a weekly Friday morning painting workshop, a monthly food pantry, an annual chili supper and the Arts Café neighborhood festival, which gets bigger every year.
Tackling the challenge of creating affordable housing is a foundational way to be good. In 2019 the NNN started building—and has continued to build—new affordable housing on the neighborhood’s vacant lots, many of which were the result of former Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s “1,000 Houses in 1,000 Days” blight-tackling campaign. Their work has attracted the attention of other building companies, and today the amount of new construction going on is truly astonishing. It appears the neighborhood is being restored without becoming gentrified, which is no small feat.
And when he retired (sort of), NNN resident Mike Keen, the creator and former director of Indiana University South Bend’s Center for a Sustainable Future, turned his focus on his neighborhood. Keen teamed with area builders to create energy-efficient, affordable housing in the NNN. He also formed a group of investors and tackled the transformation of the huge, empty Ward Bakery Building into a handsome small-business hub.
“One of the most important turning points was the opening of The Local Cup and the Portage Farm Stands. This was all done by neighbors and helped to catalyze the revitalization of what used to be one of the neighborhood’s most vibrant commercial nodes,” says Keen.
The Local Cup, which was founded by a quartet of neighbors, is a pay-it-forward coffeehouse in the NNN building. Nestled between the offices and the community center, it also holds a beautiful little art gallery curated by David Allen, one of the region’s most admired landscape painters. Allen also conducts the Friday morning art gatherings.
The Portage Farm Stands farmers market, which used to set up in the parking lot across from the NNN Center, was initiated by Susan and Ryan Greutmann of Sunchoke Farms, the urban farm they planted on several vacant lots throughout the neighborhood. Susan recently moved her farm’s produce store to a permanent stall in the South Bend Farmers Market, and she and Ryan added a local compost pickup service to their business of growing organic food, so it’s time for someone else to step in and keep the Portage Farm Stands going. Any takers?
Success has continued to attract more success: At the beginning of the Covid-19 shutdown, No. 6 Restaurant opened in the old firehouse and a Unity Garden satellite was built across the street. Both are thriving. When botanist and landscape designer Ben Futa returned to the area, he saw the good things happening in the NNN and opened The Botany Shop right next to the old flower shop on Portage. Futa has provided his native-plant garden design skills for many residents, resulting in more pollinators and more birds. That old flower shop next door now houses The Portage Collective, a woman-owned creative enterprise where you can find a grab-and-go gourmet fridge, artistic recycled clothing and more. A group of volunteers created Feed a Friend, a give-and-take food pantry located, not surprisingly, on the side of the NNN building, which delivers food from Cultivate Food Rescue five days a week. Residents can give and they can take, no questions asked.
The shuttered hardware and grocery store now house the NNN Community Building. The Ward Bakery Building is open for business. There is a new laundromat down the street. We now have not one but two cool coffeehouses since Cloud Walking, a collaborative business on Mishawaka Avenue, opened Counterspell, a satellite coffeehouse in the old Ward Bakery Building. And we have a bookstore. A bookstore! Brain Lair Books is owned and operated by Kathy Burnett, whose mission is uplifting marginalized voices. Her coffee mug states Read Books, Drink Coffee, Fight Evil, and she chose our neighborhood to take her stand.
We still need a grocery store. Maybe we’ll get a bodega. Or a food co-op. The way things have been going, it’s going to be something good.
Molly B. Moon is a singer-songwriter, writing and performing original music with her partner, Riley O’Connor. She’s retired from teaching high-school language arts for the South Bend Community School Corporation. You can catch her playing old-timey music at the session at Fiddler’s Hearth in South Bend, Indiana, most any Tuesday night.
